Gimme Some Sugar

Blog Roll

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

CNN:
After weaknesses in its ground game were badly exposed in 2012, the
Republican National Committee is taking a page straight out of the
Democratic playbook and launching an ambitious “50 state strategy” that
will steer party resources and staffers to every corner of the country
as it works to repair its voter contact effort before the next
presidential election.

The party’s short-term vision with the project is to help the GOP win
key races this November and in next year’s midterm elections.

But that’s only part of a larger and more important goal for
Republicans: rebuilding a broken and outdated get-out-the-vote operation
that seemed dominant during the George W. Bush era, but was overtaken
in 2012 by a Democratic coalition that had spent years polishing its
tactics in the fields of voter contact, persuasion, data collection and
statistical modeling.

The problem here is that, while the party plans to compete in every
state, they don’t plan on competing for every vote. Relying on GOTV
efforts shows that Republicans have given up on minority outreach and
have embraced the "missing white voter" hypothesis. Conservatives like this hypothesis, because it’s become fashionable on that side of the aisle to be shockinglyracist — which makes winning over anyone other than white voters a little bit of a challenge.

The good news for Democrats is that the missing white voter is
fantasy. No matter how hard you scrape the bottom, there’s no more mayo
in that jar. The Republican tendency to dismiss reality is finally
coming to bite them in the rear, as it had to eventually, causing them
to waste resources getting out voters who don’t actually exist.